Black and Blue Magic (10 page)

As time passed and Harry flew and flew and flew, he forgot all about the fog, the city below him, and just about everything. Nothing in the world seemed to matter but wings, and sky, and motion. The free and endless kind of motion that people are always looking for in a hundred different ways.

Flying was the way a swing swoops up; and the glide down a slide. It was the shoot of a sled downhill without the long climb back up. It was the very best throat-tightening thrills of skis, skates, surfboards and trampolines. Diving boards, merry-go-rounds, Ferris wheels, roller coasters, skate boards and soap-box coasters. It was all of them, one after the other, all at once and a thousand times over.

Harry didn’t have any idea how much time had passed when, during a long quiet glide, he noticed that the sky above the Berkeley hills had turned the pale green color that it often was just before dawn. Morning wasn’t far away. The thought brought Harry back to earth with a jolt. Mentally anyway. How to get back was the problem.

As he slanted into a sharp turn and a long slow glide towards home, he realized that it wasn’t going to be easy. By taking his bearings from the bay and the hills and the few tall buildings that stuck up through the fog, he would be able to come down in the general vicinity. But it wasn’t very likely that he would be able to go straight down to his own back yard. And it certainly wouldn’t do to blunder around blindly looking for Kerry Street. He’d be sure to wind up wrapped around a trolley line or tangled in telephone wires.

For a minute or two he felt panicky, but then he managed to calm down enough to think it over carefully. He drifted in a big circle over the general area of home and tried to figure something out. He finally decided to make as good a guess as he could, and go straight down and land. If he could hit a roof top, even if it wasn’t too near home, it would be a good place to get his bearings without being seen, and then plan his next move.

He picked his spot carefully. Fortunately the fog had begun to thin a bit, and more buildings and hilltops were visible. Twin Peaks were in the clear now, and the towers of the bridge reached high above the fog. Harry located a tall apartment building that looked like one he could see from his own window, and if the blinking green glow to his left was what he thought it was—the drive-in just two blocks from home—he wasn’t going to be far wrong. He cupped his wings just a bit and started down in as small and slow a spiral as he could manage. Once inside the fog belt he was blind and helpless. Straining his eyes until they hurt, and with his heart thumping in his throat, he drifted down and down until suddenly a dark surface rushed up beneath him. Desperately, he reversed his wing beat, but it was too late to keep from landing with a thud that sent him to his hands and knees.

“Ouch,” he said, and then, “Oh, for Pete Squeaks!” He’d torn a big hole in the knee of his pajama pants. Mom wasn’t going to like that. He stood up and looked around. Now that he was down, there was some reflected glow in the air from the street lights, and he could tell that he was on the flat roof of a large building. By some rare good fortune, he had come down in a rather small open area between a long clothesline and a very fancy T.V. antenna. A little bit more to one side or the other and he’d have messed up somebody’s wash or else their T.V. reception. Not to mention what it might have done to him.

All of a sudden he realized that there was something familiar about the whole thing. He made his way carefully to the edge and looked over, and sure enough, there, right next door, was Marco’s Boarding House. Harry had come down right smack dab on top of Madelaine’s School of Ballet.

The rest was easy. He walked along the edge of the roof until he was exactly opposite his own window on the third floor. From there it took only a couple of flaps of his wings to take him across the alley. Of course, he did get sort of jammed in the window for a moment, because he forgot to fold his wings before he tried to go through. But he got them down all right and climbed into the room, with nothing more than a few splinters from the window frame. He felt pretty lucky about that, because he’d thought for a second that he was going to fall out again, backwards.

Because he’d made a few whacking and thudding noises getting into the room, he didn’t waste any time about saying the reverse incantation. It wouldn’t do to have Mom come in to investigate before he got rid of his wings. The incantation worked fine. The feeling wasn’t quite as violent as when the wings grew. It was more of a shrinking sensation. The dizziness came down like a dark curtain and, when it was over, the wings were gone.

Harry couldn’t help having a feeling of loss—a sharp stab of regret—even though he knew that his wings had to go for the time being, at least. He reached back suddenly and touched the spot where the wings had been. As he ran his fingers across his back, he had a strange sensation that in some unexplainable way the wings were still there. As if he would always be able to feel them there, now that he knew about them—deep inside his back, tiny wings or maybe only wing buds. Probably they’d always been there. Maybe everybody had wing buds, or at least the possibility of wings, only they just didn’t know it. Maybe people had really been meant to have wings.

All of a sudden Harry realized that he was shivering violently. It had been very cold coming down through the fog belt, and it wasn’t much warmer in his room. He pulled on his pajama top and then his robe for good measure, and jumped into bed.

Only a few hours later Harry woke up in a glorious glow of sunshine and excitement. He had extremely stiff shoulder muscles, a bump on his head, two skinned knees, a bruised heel, several splinters, torn pajama pants, and the beginnings of a cold in the head. Not to mention the most marvelous, wonderful, super-colossal secret in the whole world.

I
T DIDN’T TURN OUT
to be such a very bad cold in the head, at least not right at first. But it was bad enough to make Harry decide he ought to wear something more than pajama pants the next time he went flying. He’d have to pick out something to fly in—something light and yet warm. It wasn’t until he slipped out of bed and was standing in front of his closet that he realized he had a problem: how do you get into a sweat-shirt when you’re already wearing wings? Of course, you can cut some big holes for the wings to come through, but then you have a different problem: how to explain two big holes in the back of your sweat-shirt to Mom.

Harry was still standing in front of the closet trying to figure out what he could wear when Mom came in. “Hi,” she said, “do you know what time it is?”

Harry looked at his clock on the bed table. “For Pete Squeaks!” he said. “It’s nine o’clock. I slept right through breakfast.”

“I called you earlier,” Mom said. “But you didn’t wake up. Then I remembered you were up late helping Mr. Mazzeeck move out, so I let you sleep in.”

Up late! Mom didn’t know the half of it. She’d flip if she knew how late he’d really been up. And what if she knew how far up?

Not that Harry wouldn’t have liked to tell Mom all about it. But of course, he couldn’t; he’d promised Mr. Mazzeeck to keep it a secret.

“Well, get dressed and come on down to the kitchen,” Mom said. “I’ll fix you some breakfast.” She started to leave, but then she stopped and took another look. “Well, for goodness sake. What happened to your pants?” She was looking at the big hole that Harry had torn in the knee of his pajamas when he lit on the roof of Madelaine’s School of Ballet.

“I guess I ... Well, I just fell down,” Harry said. It was certainly the truth, too, as far as it went. As long as Mom didn’t start asking “where?” and “how come?”

He needn’t have worried, though. Mom only shook her head slowly and went on out the door. After all, she’d known Harry long enough to know he usually didn’t have any particular reason for that sort of thing.

But this morning Harry didn’t waste any time brooding about the boring old subject of his clumsiness. He had better things to think about. Remembering about last night was almost as exciting as living it had been. In fact, every time he thought about what it had been like last night, up there over the city, he felt as if something had just pulled up a draw string on his stomach. He kept thinking about it all the time he was eating his breakfast at the kitchen table. Or trying to eat it anyway.

All of a sudden Mom said, “Harry, are you getting sick? You’ve hardly eaten anything and you have the strangest expression on your face. And you’re sneezing, too. Three times since you came downstairs.”

Harry did his best to convince Mom that he felt all right, and then he made a real effort to act normal while he finished his breakfast. He managed to eat two eggs and three bowls of cereal, which wasn’t quite as much as usual, but close enough so that Mom stopped worrying.

As soon as his morning chores were finished, he went up to the attic. It had occurred to him that among the old clothes and costumes and things Mom kept stored up there, he might find something that would make a good flying outfit.

Inside the attic door, Harry couldn’t help checking on the poster of the old Swami. It was still there, all right, behind the washstand, looking pale and dusty and not the least bit talkative. Harry grinned at himself sheepishly, and started in on his search.

It had been quite a while since he had looked through Dad’s things. When Harry unfastened the latches and pushed back the lid of the big trunk the first thing he saw was Dad’s high black hat and the ebony wand with the silver tip.

Right away he started feeling uncomfortable. Looking at all that stuff of Dad’s made him feel—well, sad, of course—but something that was almost worse. Time can soften sadness until it’s only a gentle ache, full of warm memories. But a guilty conscience is always sharp and cold. And that’s what Harry felt every time he looked at the things Dad had tried to teach him to use. Dad had counted so much on his becoming a famous magician, and for a long time now he hadn’t even tried.

Everything he found brought back memories. There were the little round disks that Dad could make appear and disappear between his fingers, or even into and out of his mouth and ears. That was a hard one to learn. Harry used to drop the things all over the floor, and once when he was trying the mouth trick, he’d darn near choked on one of the disks.

He sighed and put the stuff back into the trunk. There was no use even thinking about it. In spite of Dad’s plans and the prophecy and everything else, he just wasn’t ever going to be any good at magic.

“Wait a minute” Harry said, right out loud. Maybe the prophecy never meant that he was supposed to be a magician at all. The Swami had only said, “The boy has a rare gift and his magic will be of a very special kind.” Suppose the rare gift meant Mr. Mazzeeck’s gift of the silver bottle, and the special kind of magic just might be WINGS! If that was what it meant maybe he hadn’t messed up the prophecy after all. Harry caught himself glancing over at the poster, as if he expected the Swami to let him know if he were on the right track. He wasn’t exactly surprised to find that the poster Swami still wasn’t talking. But anyway Harry felt a lot better about the whole thing.

He went back to looking through the trunk, but when he came to Dad’s costumes he realized right away that they wouldn’t do for flying. They were just too nice to cut holes in, and there wasn’t a single one that had a place for wings to come through.

Next, he went through some boxes of old clothing, but everything either didn’t fit or wasn’t warm enough to do any good. He was about to give up in the attic when he found a pair of old white drapes. They weren’t what he’d had in mind, but they just might do.

The rest of the day Harry spent waiting around for night to come, and wishing he dared to fly in the daytime. But he knew it would be far too risky. Somebody might see him, and even if he was willing to risk losing his wings himself, it wouldn’t be right to take a chance because of Mr. Mazzeeck.

While he waited for the long afternoon to be over, he talked to Lee Furdell for a while over the back fence. Lee said he’d been thinking about the Marriage Plan, but so far he hadn’t come up with anything definite. He did think, however, that it would help if they could get rid of Miss Clyde, somehow.

“She doesn’t show any signs of being dissatisfied with the boarding house, does she?” he asked.

“Gosh no!” Harry said. “She’s happy as a clam. With Mom’s good cooking and Mr. Brighton to flop her eyelashes at, she’ll probably be here until the end of the world.”

“Hmm!” Lee said. Then his sad brown eyes lit up with a twinkle. “I don’t suppose you could manage to throw a medicine bottle at
her
ankle?”

Harry laughed. “I would if I could think of a way to do it that wouldn’t look fishy. But even if I did, I bet it wouldn’t work. It’d take a lot more than that to scare old Clarissa away.”

“Well, I’ll keep working on it,” Lee said. “Maybe I’ll hit on a plan.”

After dinner that night, Mom and Mr. Konkel and Mr. Brighton and Miss Clyde started a bridge game. There wasn’t anything Harry could do about that, and besides it was better than having them split up, two and two, the wrong way. So he told everyone good-night and went on upstairs to his room. It was still pretty light outside, but he decided to get all ready so he could take off the minute it was dark enough to be safe.

He had a sneaking suspicion that he shouldn’t fly at all tonight when he was already catching a cold; but he just couldn’t wait any longer. Besides, if he dressed up nice and warm, it shouldn’t do him any harm.

Some old white gym shoes would be nice and light for flying and at the same time keep his feet warm, and a pair of Levis would be much warmer than the thin pajama pants. Next, he was ready for his wings. He took off his shirt and got the silver bottle out from its hiding place at the back of his sock drawer.

His heart was thumping hard as he poured the glowing drops of ointment onto his shoulders, and his hands shook just a bit as he rubbed it in. He took a deep breath and recited the incantation:

Wing feather, bat leather, hollow bone,